“The Godfather” and Style

As I noted here last week, the first two “Godfather” movies may well have conquered the shaggy spirit of their day with a revived and narrowed naturalism—one that has since found fertile ground on cable television. But there’s an enduring vision and aesthetic yearning at the core of Francis Ford Coppola’s quest, and there’s nothing cynical or self-serving about his artistic achievement. On the contrary, Coppola’s success occurred because his sensibility happened to coincide with several moods of his contemporary moment.

What Coppola pursued, through that diptych’s performances, composition, and cinematography, was a sense of style at a time when it seemed superfluous. He lovingly recaptured a version of classic-age Hollywood elegance—a plausible reproduction of a material world and its social relationships, with a barely conspicuous yet severely crafted level of artifice. In those films, restraint in acting matches the understated exertion of power by the filmmakers who were confident in it. The tightly controlled camera work befits the exacting screenwriting, with its precise delivery of emotional content. And the meticulous lighting (I sometimes think that the cinematographer Gordon Willis, with his striking low-light effects, is the real auteur of the films) evokes a carefully calibrated mood. The consistency of tone—the sense of the movies being one mightily unified composition—is doubled by the taut-yet-unhurried economy of effect.

The paradox of Coppola’s pursuit of style is that it was designed for maximum legibility. (I use that word to evoke its dependence on the script, and its usefulness in conveying the script’s substance with a pellucid efficiency.) For all the director’s accomplishment, it’s an oddly self-effacing one.

The golden-age Hollywood style essentially depends on collectively acknowledged codes—on repression, omission, even censorship. The very nature of style is irony: a secret public confession of saying what one isn’t saying, of showing what one isn’t showing, of confiding publicly in sympathizers, and assuming that those who don’t see the style are complicit in the code of silence at which style is a sly wink. Style is a mark of savvy that creates its own secret inner circle, a dispersed and democratic aristocracy of taste. (Perhaps the ultimate evidence can be found in the films of Howard Hawks, whose apparent clarity of manner, which mimes transparency, is as severely artificial as the prose of Ernest Hemingway, and as heatedly forged by an ethic of beauty that views slovenly superfluity, in behavior or in camerawork, as a self-indulgent slackness of character.)

Coppola made “The Godfather” in an era when authenticity and sincerity, a one-to-one correspondence between expression and content, were suddenly prime new values. The breaking down of Hollywood conventions of the classic era reflected an aspirational moment of liberation. But those “new freedoms” left lots of viewers behind and, suddenly, nostalgia was in vogue—as in the first two “Godfather”s, “The Sting,” “The Way We Were,” “The Last Picture Show,” and “American Graffiti.”

Another prime example of the era’s movie-centric nostalgia was made by one of the luminaries of the late, lamented high-studio age: “The Front Page,” from 1974, directed by Billy Wilder. On the occasion of its revival in France this week, Julien Gester writes about it in Libération and quotes a 1974 interview with Wilder (reprinted in “Billy Wilder: Interviews”), by Joseph McBride, from Boston’s The Real Paper:

“The time for Lubitsch is past,” he said bluntly. “It’s just a loss of something marvelous, the loss of a style I aspired to. The subtlest comedy you can get right now is ‘M*A*S*H.’… There is a different set of values today. Something which is warm and gentle and funny and urbane and civilized hasn’t got a chance. There is a lack of patience which is sweeping the nation, or the world, for that matter. Noel Coward would not succeed today….”

In doing “The Front Page,” Wilder said, he is trying to be “as subtle and elegant as possible.” Will the time come when the audience will once again be willing to accept the Lubitsch style? “No less a director than Ingmar Bergman plans to do ‘The Merry Widow’; let’s wait and see.” But in the meantime what is Wilder to do?…”You are not going to buck audiences at two or three million a clip, or you’ll wind up on your keister. What good is it being a marvelous composer of polkas if nobody dances the polka any more?”

I’ve never been sure whether the restraint, subtlety, urbanity, and gentility that Wilder fondly recalls were actual properties of daily life or only cinematic conventions—or whether the sudden wave of nostalgia was the result of viewers (i.e. white Americans) recalling superseded customs, traditions, and privileges through a sentimental suburban haze. A hint comes from a remark made by Orson Welles in 1985, the last year of his life, which is quoted in a notable new book of his conversations with Roger Hill (more about that book soon). Recalling his 1936 production of “Macbeth,” Welles said: “Then, I would walk home through Central Park and watch the sun come up. There was never a thought of danger. I’m scared inside a locked car now. It’s terrible to see the change.”

The cinematic stylization that came to fruition in the sixties—in the work of such filmmakers as Sam Peckinpah, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville—courted opacity and ambiguity in order to realize something like modern music: their rigorous compositions aimed at—and achieved—effects independent of the action. Coppola’s sense of style, by contrast, had neither excesses nor hollows; he emptied the classic manner of its allusions and took its elegance of behavior, and of form, at face value. The assertion that classic Hollywood glamour was a front for Mob violence (as with the famous horse-head scene, early in the first film) never becomes ironic, never questions or undermines his own style; it remains an arm’s-length editorial commentary.

At the time, there were younger filmmakers who adopted classical modes for works of an advanced modernism, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Chantal Akerman. They grasped the inner ferocity that glamorously repressed images contained, concealed, and conveyed—and, seeing the same fierce passions and fierce repressions at work in their own time, they reclaimed a new symbolism in the name of a new liberation. (It’s worth recalling that Resnais’s own forms were forged in the midst of France’s rigid political censorship of movies.) When Martin Scorsese made “New York, New York,” he was doing far more than celebrating bygone days—he was excavating volcanic furies from the severe styles of the city of his youth.

The question of style remains one of the most vigorously disputed critical questions, albeit one that’s often subordinated to other overt concerns. The greatest stylist of our time, Wes Anderson, is too often criticized for the abstraction of his subjects when, in fact, that abstraction is the very precondition of style. Independent films are often (wrongly) derided for a lack of style when their makers are attempting to burst the limits of screenplay craft to bring new realms of life into their movies. And Paul Schrader’s remarkably stylish new film “The Canyons” entombs an ambient malevolence, a world of moral rot and ooze, in the gloss and the glide of its surfaces. It’s a terribly sad, terribly far-reaching movie that confounds critics who are expecting the psychological explicitness of television dramas.

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